Shostag jutted his chin, and spun his huge axe with a flourish. “You know, that arm would look better if I hacked off the rest of it for you.”

“Come give it a try,” Raj Ahten urged. The Wolf Lord was studying the swath of corpses, some of them still in the process of falling, strewn in a path from the kitchens.

With a start, Raj Ahten dashed left, darted up the narrow road to some lord’s manor, away from Shostag. As he sped along the street, he slashed the throat of any defender within reach, shoved his own men from his path.

Shostag leapt after him. He saw Raj Ahten’s plan.

Shostag was at the pinnacle of twenty men, each vectoring metabolism to him. And several of those men had taken endowments of metabolism before, so that Shostag now ran with the speed of forty. If Raj Ahten could find a man in the serpent and slaughter him, he’d break the line of Shostag’s power, “slice the serpent” in two.

By doing so, he’d give two separate warriors high metabolism, create two serpents’ heads, neither able to strike as quickly as Shostag could now. Raj Ahten was hunting for Dedicates.

If Shostag was lucky, Raj Ahten would find a man near the tail of the serpent. Killing the tail would still leave Shostag with high metabolism, leave him with the speed of something close to forty.

But Shostag preferred not to rely on luck.

Raj Ahten had glanced at the corpses strewn across the yard, seen that Shostag came from the kitchens. Now Raj Ahten suspected that the Dedicates wouldn’t be hiding in the Dedicates’ Keep, but were secreted around the castle. Raj Ahten ran to the nearest unsecured building.

Shostag followed, rounded a corner too fast. His center of gravity kept him traveling so that he bowled into half a dozen of the castle’s defenders. He scraped his leg on some man’s pike. Regained his feet. Ran.

The air felt heavy, hard to breathe. Shostag did not have the endowments of brawn necessary to easily draw breath with such high metabolism. His head spun; he felt dizzy.

Raj Ahten turned at a doorway leading to the lord’s apartments, raced into the manor. Shostag followed.

Shostag was a Wolf Lord, with endowments of scent from three dogs. He could smell better than most men ever dreamed, and men are such smelly brutes. Thus he wasn’t surprised to enter the room and see Raj Ahten tearing at the door of a cedar wardrobe. Like Shostag, Raj Ahten didn’t need to see a man to know that one was hiding in the room.

Shostag rushed Raj Ahten, axe whirling.